Migrants
1
He couldn’t quite understand why, when he fell off his bike, and a stranger came to help him up, asking if he was okay, he was so moved. He went back to his flat and cried for the first time in what seemed like decades. As he couldn’t stop sobbing, he initially wondered if it was a sign of a breakdown, or at least an awareness that the last three months had been harder than any he could remember. It wasn’t only that there had been talk of redundancies at work, and at the same time that mortgage rates went up, he’d also become less keen to socialise, and felt that when he did, friends were no longer interested in hearing what he had to say. He was viewing everything so bleakly, some friends would insist. Why didn’t he enjoy life a little? Their jobs were probably no safer than his, and some of them didn’t even have a mortgage and were paying more than a third of their salary to a landlord who sometimes wouldn’t even make the necessary repairs. They were no different from many living in contemporary Britain, and neither was he. We need a revolution, one said; we need to get rid of the immigrants, said another — offering it as a joke, though one that probably wouldn’t even have been made twenty years earlier.
It was an immigrant who had helped him up after he skidded on what he believed was black ice. The weather was around zero degrees, and Tom was breaking as he pulled in by the front door of his tenement building. He skidded to one side and landed on his left elbow and knee. Tom lay there for a second or two, as a couple of cyclists slowed down and, as they passed, said they hoped he was alright. He nodded without thinking, and a few seconds after, as he still lay there, a food courier stopped, got off his bike, and asked if everything was fine. He spoke in broken English and with a soft, beseeching voice. He enquired whether Tom may have broken anything. It seemed not, and while the elbow and knee would no doubt be bruised, perhaps a little swollen, Tom was sure he was okay. He had a helmet on, didn’t land on his head or his face, and he fell from a modest height, at a slow speed, and without colliding into anything other than the pavement below him. Tom felt at least as stupid as he felt in pain, and yet this was alleviated when Rahul said, after offering his name, and Tom gave his, that it wasn’t black ice which had been responsible for the fall, as Tom had muttered aloud, but a large piece of plastic that Rahul picked up, showed him, and put into the bin. It could have happened to anyone, he said, as if to make Tom feel better, but also to propose that he could have skidded off the road a minute after Tom, and that Tom’s accident had saved him from a fall.
Tom sensed as they talked for no more than a couple of minutes, and when Tom was back on his feet, that Rahul managed to encapsulate in his attitude at least two narratives that we’d do well to remember, and that for centuries, in different forms, had been vital component of our narratives: the kindness of strangers, and there but for the grace of God go I. Rahul didn’t only stop to see how Tom was; he also proposed that his accident was Rahul’s good fortune, and the least he could do was attend to the person who suffered the mishap in his place. Tom asked him about his job, and he was reluctant to talk about it, as Tom supposed he was illegally in the country, and constantly worried he would say or do something that would reveal his status. What he did say was that he could wait with him for a few minutes if Tom wished him to do so; the food would still be warm, as Tom realised he was in the middle of a delivery, and knew how much of their earnings relied on them completing it as quickly as possible. It added to Tom’s admiration for this kind stranger, and as they shook hands, Tom said to him, whatever his status, any country should be happy to have someone like him in it. He thanked Tom for saying it and, if Tom were presumptuously to turn the look on Rahul’s face into words that he may have expressed, he believed they would have said this: people see us as invisible at best, visible and ripe for insult at worst. They want the cheap food, and they don’t want the illegal immigration; they won’t do the work, but won’t respect the people who are doing it. And yet there was no anger in his face, only a delicate sorrow, as this man of about 25, with white teeth and alert eyes, said that he appreciated Tom’s kindness. Tom said it was he who should be thankful, and that he appreciated his.
2
So they parted. Tom lifted the bike up the first flight of stairs, attached it to the landing, and carried on up a further three flights to the top floor. He took off his jacket, his body warmer and his jumper, and looked at his elbow. It was grazed and bruised, but the swelling was modest. He pulled up his trouser leg and saw that the knee was also grazed, but again it wasn’t serious. He then sat down on the couch and wept, and in that weeping, he began to recall a moment when he too was a migrant, however, tentatively, and where he was helped by the kindness of a stranger. If a French writer could say all our tears, no matter how old we are, happen to be the tears of a child, Tom supposed it was that child’s tears he was once again activating.
Tom was ten when he moved from London to a west coast Scottish island and probably the one with the darkest skin, and the kids took turns mocking his colouring and his Englishness, as though they couldn’t quite decide which prejudice they believed ought to be more prominent, and were perhaps especially annoyed that he contained within him more than one, which risked producing an ambivalence in them. After a couple of months, they prompted for the skin colour, aware that there were a couple of English kids in school they could attack if they wanted to go for nationality, and reserve for Tom the exclusive rights of racial prejudice. The irony was that Tom happened to be more English than Turkish - he was born in London; his father was from Istanbul, and his mother from the island where she wished to return and where they did so after a post for a primary teacher came up and she took it. Tom’s father was an engineer, and he worked on the various islands. They were happy to have moved, and Tom kept from them his own unhappiness as if it would interfere with their own. Tom would also have believed that he was the problem, since his sister, four years older, seemed to suffer none of the prejudice to which he was a victim. While she shared the same skin tone, the perception was different. People would refer to her as exotic, and she quickly acquired a boyfriend who was much fancied by others. Tom instead was a dirty foreigner, and perhaps were he in the secondary school almost a mile away, he could have benefited from the admiration Simona received, but he had a year of primary seven to get through before that would be so.
3
That evening as he sat on the couch after the accident, he recalled various incidents that were submerged by a life that had become so different from his childhood years that it was as though he was following a story that was someone else’s, but became his through the emotion of identification, rather than the memories he would find when, say, remembering a holiday the previous year, a friend’s birthday eighteen month’s ago. He didn’t believe this was simply a matter of how much time had passed; were it not for the tears, he didn’t think he would have accessed these childhood incidents. If the French writer was correct, then for some of us, we need the lachrymose to bring forth the moments of our earlier years. Tom had no friends from that time, no longer ate any of the foods he ate on the island, and never talked to his sister about a period of their lives that they would have viewed so differently. While he stayed on the couch for more than an hour, conjuring up more and more images of that year in his life, he wondered if the tears were so determined to flow that they hadn’t only activated memory, they were creating images to match his tearful state. Did these things happen to him, or not, and who could he ask to confirm that they did? These were not memories that were any longer communal, as they could share those of that holiday where six of them went and hired a small chateau in the middle of France, or that birthday party with more than a dozen of them dining in a restaurant in the city. These were memories that were shared, a trite enough phrase in most instances, but potentially useful when trying to confirm events that otherwise can seem no more valid than the oneiric. Tom wondered during that hour whether what he was conjuring up was no more valid than the content of his dreams.
If confirmation is the best way to secure memories, then what are we to do when there is nobody to confirm them? What else can one really rely upon? Tom found it that evening in causality, finding in his imaginings a coherence that could pass for a past he could claim as his own, and it started with an image of a World Cup football match, and a game of football he joined after going out after England won. He initially played keepie-up alone in the park. He was good at keeping the ball in the air, and sometimes did it for thirty minutes, but probably didn’t see then this skill as quite the sign of solitude it happened to be, and he would have been playing alone because nobody proposed he join them for a team game. Nevertheless, that evening, one of the boys playing with ten others asked him if he wanted to play - they were a man short. The request came from someone who wasn’t one of the bullies, had never made a joke about his being English, never made a comment on Tom’s skin, but he was playing with others who were, and two of them who had instigated the insults on the first day he attended school were playing for the other team. He knew from other games they had played that they would hack away at his legs, push him off the ball, and grab at his shirt. They would be even more vengeful today as England had won, and he was wearing his English top. Tom paused. The boy looked at him with a beseeching gesture and added that he shouldn’t worry. Nobody was going to give him a hard time. He said it with a mixture of inclusiveness and irritation, but with an element of the latter there as if he knew that Tom’s hesitancy itself could be an opportunity for the insults to start. His name may have been Neil, but he was probably better known by a nickname. But as Tom thought back to this moment, Neil seemed to fit.
Neil was a good player and a generous one, who would lay the ball off when he thought another had a better chance of scoring, was encouraging when someone missed, even with a selfish shot, and would talk his way through a game without needless yelling. Neil wasn’t from the island either, but from somewhere in the Highlands. He was Scottish and easy to admire. The two boys Tom feared on the opposing team were both islanders, and while they may have respected Neil, they would have seen weakness rather than strength in his desire to get me to play. Neil was bigger than the others - who might have been called Ian and Donald - but he wasn’t intimidating. It was as if he’d grown into a body that he didn’t quite know what to do with, looking a couple of years older than everyone else in his year. It gave him everybody’s respect, but nothing in his behaviour suggested he demanded it. Ian and Donald were no bigger than Tom — average height at best, perhaps even a little on the small side. But even those who weren’t their victims knew they were vicious, and if people didn’t intervene when they stole Tom’s sweets, went off once with his football, flicked a rolled towel at him when Tom came out of the shower after a gym class, he didn’t suppose it was because others sympathised with their actions; more afraid that they would turn on them.
Yet their refusal to intervene made him feel as if the bullying was more collective than it actually was, and though others during that year did sometimes offer remarks about his Englishness or comments on his colour, Tom thought he could have laughed them off were they isolated. It might have been overhearing people say the white top went well with his skin tone, and he would fit right into a team full of black people. England in the eighties had various black players (Viv Anderson, John Barnes, Luther Blissett), while Scotland had none at all, and it was around the time that an English player who started to play for Rangers, Mark Walters, would have bananas thrown onto the pitch while he was playing. Tom assumed Scotland had never had any black players, and this was long before a quick internet search could reveal that Scotland did indeed have a black player in the late 19th century: Andrew Watson. But that probably wouldn’t have been much of a defence either: he was English and a person of colour in the eyes of people in his year, and that they could associate the two made their prejudices seem grounded.
On another occasion in the changing rooms after gym, Tom was putting back on his vest, and somebody proposed what he would look like if he were wearing a string one: a teabag. It wasn’t made by Ian or Donald: they weren’t even around. But they soon enough heard about it and, for the next couple of months, people would laugh and say what do you call Tommy in a string vest? A Teabag. This became a nickname: Tommy Teabag, and sometimes it would be no more than a half-joke, a remark made on the pitch when someone would ask him to pass the ball. But it was also used more menacingly when Donald or Ian would trip him up when he was in the playground. They would insist, stay down, Teabag, stay down.
Tom thought about how the bullying escalated over those months and how it shifted from nationality to race, from casual remarks by a few to outright physical abuse from Ian and Donald, to the continuation of that abuse by the two of them, and the extension of mockery that came after he was given the moniker Teabag. What he couldn’t recall was Neil’s presence in his life from the day of that football game, which would have been not long after he had moved to the island, not long after he’d started that last year in primary school, and the other moment when he would recall an older boy’s presence almost nine month’s later, and who somehow he twinned in his mind with Neil.
After sobbing on the couch, after an hour dwelling on these moments that were coming to him, he made some dinner, watched an episode of a favourite TV show, and read a report for work before going to bed. As he tried to get off to sleep, he was no longer thinking of his days on the island, but of his sister, and some of the posts she’d been putting on social media in recent months. He never responded to any of them, but he promised to talk to her about these posts when next meeting up. Simona was living in Manchester, had two children in school, and her first posts that indicated prejudice were about classroom overcrowding: she started to blame this on ethnic minorities. Within months, she was putting up statements about swarms of people coming in, criminal incidents by immigrants, and proposing mass deportation. From being someone who voted for the UK to stay within the European Union, she’d shifted to supporting a party that was most adamantly determined to keep us out of it. He had been planning to visit for months, usually saw her and the kids twice a year, and told himself that he was best staying silent about the posts until he saw her in person.
That evening, he dreamt about Simona, and her turning up one day to his primary school, and in the middle of Ian and Donald asking him to turn out his pockets as they looked for money. In the dream, she held them not by the scruff of the neck, but with her gaze. They looked at this beauty, several years older than them, and were so transfixed that they couldn’t look away, and remained in that stance for however long the dream continued. It was as if within the dream, months passed, and Tom became popular in his year, and even pecked a girl on the cheek behind the science building, scored various goals, proved a hero to his team, and was praised by the teachers without being mocked by the other kids. All the time this was happening, Ian and Donald were still standing there, and my sister was no longer anywhere to be seen.
Tom awoke the next morning, remembering the dream, and even jotted a few words down on paper over breakfast. He sometimes took notes of his dreams and believed that they could tell him about his anxieties as long as he didn’t take them too literally or too symbolically. They were reflections of feelings that he couldn’t process in consciousness, he assumed, and didn’t doubt that this one was drawing upon the thoughts of earlier in the evening. It perhaps also came about because he didn’t sleep very deeply, and he woke up several times as he tried to find a comfortable position without pressing against his knee or shoulder. Yet as he showered and prepared for work, the pain was mild, and he cycled to work, though for the first time in his life looking for large sheets of plastic on the road, as if wary of black ice.
5
His job was an admin post in the Scottish government, and while he didn’t dislike it, he sometimes wondered if there was any point in doing it, or rather, that he felt almost no sense of his personality in the job, except doing it as competently as he could. Wasn’t that true of all work, he might have thought, but he didn’t quite think so, and was reminded of a remark about a mathematician who said that you know your personality is involved when you get the problem wrong. It becomes your error, while the correct solution somehow belongs to maths. But if he were a teacher, a writer, a musician, he could feel he was imposing an aspect of his personality on what he was doing. When he expressed this at lunch with a colleague, who would sometimes share his dissatisfaction at work, his coworker said: Weren’t musicians often a little like mathematicians? Imagine someone in an orchestra who didn’t come in at the right moment. They would be announcing their presence, but in a way that wouldn’t be of much use to the piece being played. Tom said he supposed his argument moved us from cogs in the machine to instruments in an orchestra - a little like when a job remains the same but the term changes: a bin man becomes a waste disposal person.
Tom didn’t tell him about the accident the previous evening and didn’t, of course, tell him about the odd crisis it precipitated that left him crying on the couch for an hour, and dwelling on his childhood. But Tom did ask him what he made of so many immigrants delivering food on bikes. Tom said almost all of them appeared to be from the Middle East or South West Asia, and if leaving the European Union was supposed to make the UK more independent of outside workforces, that certainly didn’t seem to be so with food couriers. The colleague agreed, and said he supposed if we had to fit in, imagine how much more so it must be for those working in irregular work, potentially illegally in the country and being paid hardly anything at all. And no matter how hard they work, how polite they are, it will make little difference when a crime is committed, gets reported in the papers, and they will collectively be blamed as politicians talk yet again about migrants swarming the place. James offered all this as a series of politically decent platitudes that Tom wouldn’t have been inclined to disagree over, but it was as if Tom wanted him to express an aspect of their vulnerability without revealing Tom’s own. He said everything in their life must seem so precarious, so fragile. James agreed, but it felt like a political acceptance rather than a personal one, and he wondered for the first time about this colleague whom Tom had worked with for a couple of years, and what his childhood had been like.
6
During the weekend, on Saturday afternoon, he met up with a couple of friends who were a couple, and went out with others in the evening. If he hadn’t been very sociable for a while, Tom suddenly wished to be, as if trying to understand his feelings after the incident, and the feel of the country after his encounter with the courier. It was as though he wanted to be both psychoanalytic analysee and a pollster trying to gather data. He probably believed that this couple were the most optimistic people he knew, though not the most idealistic, and he distinguished between the two notions as if this were predicated on one’s attire, even if, of course, it was more a question of their politics. He met them for lunch at a brightly lit and brightly furnished cafe that had little need for the lighting that day, as the sun streamed through the large windows, and he often found himself squinting as he looked at them, as the sun shone into his eyes. It made him seem more negative than he might usually have been in their company, and there they were looking at him warmly while they were handsomely backlit. They wore similar colours, without quite going so far as to wear the same items. They nevertheless gave off a consistent colourfulness, and that day he was wearing an emerald green jumper and burgundy chinos, and she wore a canary yellow pullover with green cords. At one moment, they asked if Tom might prefer to sit on their side, and they could take his, but he insisted it was fine, and nobody would have doubted they were better suited to backlighting.
The cafe was part of a Swedish chain in the city, and they were going to have the yogurt and muesli, and, after, a cardamom bun. They had thus far only had a banana and a few nuts after waking early and making the most of the winter sunlight. They walked up around Arthur’s Seat, passing the ducks standing on the shallow, frozen pond on the way up, and looking down on Cramond village, with a blanket of light snow upon it when they took the road back, which took them past the Commonwealth Pool. They then walked to Blackford Hill, climbed that, came out by Morningside, and walked through the Meadows to the cafe. They had earned their brunch, they said, and they were right. When Tom asked them about all the food couriers in the city, they responded as he might have expected — optimistically rather than idealistically. They said it was probably a good opportunity to gain employment in the country, and a wonderful way to get lots of exercise. Even if most of them would now use electric bikes, this still required a lot of pedal power. He asked if they felt they were being exploited, and whether it seemed a great idea, given the UK health and obesity rates, that many people from poorer countries were spinning around UK cities delivering fast food. They said they would be unlikely to use them as they liked exercise, but if this is what people wanted, why shouldn’t they order a delivery?
As they talked, Tom didn’t think he was looking for a political response to the work, but he supposed he wanted to find in them as they talked about it a personal one; to have a sense in them of what it might be like as a migrant worker in a precarious position, and feeling fortunate to be allowed to stay in the country, or fearful that their illegal status might be discovered and they would be thrown out. Yet somehow the conversation couldn’t quite go there, and after, while walking around various parts of the city on his own, and taking a tea in a Stockbridge cafe, he thought about this and believed it was as if their optimism gave little room to the vulnerable. They would usually extract from any situation the most positive angle, and whether it was a friend’s job loss, a break-up, or even ill-health, they managed to see in it a chance for betterment,t rather than an acceptance of a difficult setback. If he was hoping to speak to them about his own vulnerabilities, through the kindness of the man who showed such concern after he fell, Tom had to accept these were friends who weren’t ideally suited to explore that feeling. They weren’t at all anti-immigrant, no doubt voted for left-leaning policies, and almost certainly for the Green Party, but they were people who didn’t care. Yet that seemed an absurd assumption when he thought about their allotment, their two cats, their jobs as primary school teachers.
7
In the evening, Tom met up with friends he still had from university, and others who had joined the group as partners or friends of friends. There were eleven of them, and they had commandeered a large table at the back of a pub off South Bridge Street, not far from the university’s Old College. Three or four had been drinking since six, and when Tom arrived at nine, the pub was crowded and boisterously loud, including their table. He was the last to get there, and listened to two conversations, moving in and out acoustically as he caught what interested him in one chat, and then shifted if something engage him as the others talked. In one, three of them were discussing redundancies in higher education, and all of them were academics, but two were irritated by the proclamations of the third, who reckoned universities were changing things, and why shouldn’t certain departments be axed if people either didn’t care to take the subjects, or didn’t expect to get a job out of it afterwards. They proposed that people did want to take these courses, but believed the cost of education had turned it into a practical matter about what they could afford, rather than a subject they wished to study. After all, if you have large debts to pay afterwards, obviously this would impact on your decisions over what area of education you would pursue. There was then a discussion about fees and the different rates people paid, or whether students were paying fees at all. What interested Tom was their idealism, which had nothing to do with the optimism of his friends that afternoon. It was as if the world could become hopeless and desperate, yet his friends at lunch would see ways of viewing events positively. These other friends of his at the pub, defending education, were seeing plenty of despair and wanted to rescue from this unhappy state an idealism they still believed in. Education was a right, and people should choose their degree based on what they wished for themselves as personal improvement, and not as a market economy demand.
The other conversation he could hear was about state funding, and he became interested when someone proposed that they believed in immigration, but they didn’t agree with open borders, which sounded all too predictable. But then the friend, whose name was Harry, mentioned a German philosopher he’d been reading who said that the problem for Europe and Germany, from his point of view, was that while Americans may have the idea of multiculturalism that overall worked for their society, immigration was software that the philosopher didn’t think was compatible with the hardware of the welfare state. One or the other would have to go. People who believe in the welfare state often also support high levels of immigration, but wouldn’t accept the contradiction that the German philosopher believed was evident. The others, the friend was arguing with, said they didn’t know about the philosopher’s views, but their own rested on making those two things compatible, and thought, as far as they were concerned, there was no contradiction. High immigrant numbers are inevitable in countries with aging populations, and the friend responded by saying that maybe what shouldn’t be inevitable is having an aging population. Have the policies practiced by western governments for decades created a problem that gets simultaneously alleviated and exacerbated by the notion of growth, which has come to mean economic and not biological?
It was then that Tom intervened, saying what did they make of the numerous food delivery workers in the city. They all said they hadn’t given them much thought, though on a couple of occasions Harry said he came close to running them over, when they pulled off a pavement onto the road, and the absence of high-vis gear, helmets and lights made them a hazard. Tom asked if any of them used them, and they all acknowledged that yes, they had. Tom knew they all lived on third or fourth-floor flats, and wondered if they would pick the deliveries up at the entrance door or waited for them to come up to the apartment. They said they waited at their own front doors, and while the other two said it sheepishly, one added that he was probably in his slippers. Harry said that was what they were paid for. A delivery service delivers. Why should he then go down the stairs to pick up the order? If the couple at lunch were optimists, the two people defending education, idealists, then Tom supposed Harry was a pragmatist, and whether it was his personal interests or the country’s, he looked at things practically and logically.
8
During these and other discussions that evening, Tom said little. He didn’t quite know what he was hoping to hear, but he knew also that he didn’t quite know what to say. He did know that he felt an affinity with the delivery drivers that he didn’t feel that day with his friends; these people who worked for the Scottish government, at the university, in computing, and in arts administration. All of them had salaried positions, and jobs as secure as jobs could be in an economic system that hardly prioritised stability, and partly why he and others feared for them. Yet this affinity seemed as suspect as believing that he had suffered from racism, and the next day, spending it alone and walking out to Portobello, he went for a swim not in the cold sea at this seaside village close to the city, but in Victorian baths that looked out onto the Forth. Yet he believed he did suffer the consequences of racism, even if it was predicated more on the absurd relativity of his skin colour, against the pale islanders, a skin colour so based on the need for abuse rather than on the hue of his skin, that his sister was immune to such attacks. However, even if he could claim he was the subject of abuse that was racially based, on an ignorance within bigotry, how could he claim to have anything in common with these workers, employees whose employment was insecure and who, he read, would sometimes live four to a room in bunks? It was an insult to claim he felt close to them, and yet he knew the previous night he didn’t feel close to the people with whom he’d been friends for years. He knew that he had in common with the rider was a moment of vulnerability they shared, and that led Tom to remember the terrible vulnerability of a year in his childhood.
He didn't doubt that his friends would have moments of great vulnerability as well, but they hadn’t shared them with Tom, just as Tom hadn’t shared his with them, and the way they all functioned as a group, whether optimistic, idealistic, or pragmatic, there had never been much room for sharing thoughts and feelings. They appeared to him now as a peer group that confirmed each other in their social status and their career trajectories. Some were married, a few had children, and all of them were white, even if one was Polish and another French, and the Polish friend and the French friend were both married to Scottish men, and the latter had two children. Though Tom might always have believed he was never close to any of them, he assumed he didn’t have to be for them to be friends. They had habits, enough money to practice them, and so whether it was a meeting at lunch, a pub visit, a dinner out, or a cinema or theatre outing, everyone felt included. This might have been the point: it allowed for inclusivity, but not intimacy.
9
It was while thinking this that he proposed visiting his sister, and he sent her a message asking if he should pop down for Easter, which he would commonly do. She said that would be lovely, and he fretted over buying Easter eggs for the children well in advance, risking breakage on the train, or buying them when he arrived in Manchester on Good Friday and risking shops having sold out. A couple of years back when he took them in his luggage, one of them broke, and the following year, determined this wouldn’t happen again, he decided to buy them when he arrived, only to discover that the options were, by Easter Saturday, very limited. Who would have thought that Jesus’s resurrection would give birth to such first-world problems, Tom mused, recalling when he discovered on the train that the shell of one was broken. He had ordered a tea and scoffed the shattered egg, and probably consumed no more calories than if he had eaten a small bar of chocolate. Christ was good for business.
This time, he bought them well in advance, packed them carefully, and one was an egg with mini eggs inside; the other was an egg with a selection of small candy sweets. He also bought a box of chocolates for his sister, and, as always, bought her husband a selection of 5cl single malt whiskies, which the shop put in a nice box. It had been the habit for several years now, and he knew that Maurice would buy a big bottle of the ones he particularly liked. It was probably as exorbitantly exploitative as the Easter eggs, with the amount of alcohol per cl far above what one would pay for a large bottle, but then perhaps gift giving is in itself gratuitous. It would seem churlish to complain, even if various companies profited enormously from it.
It also gave him the opportunity to alleviate the moment of initial awkwardness he often felt visiting Simona, and this might be why he rarely visited more than twice a year, and usually around Christmas and Easter. Handing over the gifts, even if they weren’t to be opened for a couple of days, made him feel like he had a purpose in being there — as though his company, in itself, wouldn’t have been enough. This shouldn’t have seemed much of a revelation (don’t most people, when visiting others, bring gifts?) But it was as though it wasn’t the convention of the gift that he was thinking about, but the vulnerability of the arriving guest.
10
When he arrived, the children were at a nearby friend’s house, Maurice was still at work, and, as Simona greeted him alone, he felt no need to bring out the presents; instead, settling into a comfortable hug and a few words about how each of them was, as his sister made some tea. He wanted to talk straight away about the courier, Tom’s reaction afterwards, his being bullied at school, his sister’s popularity, and Simona’s posts on social media. But it was four thirty in the afternoon, and he supposed this was a conversation for the evening, and maybe best explored on Sunday, after the Easter celebrations, and not long before he was to leave. If the conversation were to turn sour, his sister would at least be rid of him. Instead, that afternoon, he observed her. She was now forty and heavier around the middle, and subtly slower in her movements through space. She didn’t look as if she wished to fight oncoming middle age, and perhaps even welcomed it, seeing in the added weight, in the way she flopped down onto the coach after they went through to the sitting room, a life well-earned. She worked part-time now, but for more than a decade, she was a harried GP, and whatever worries she would have over the children seemed negligible next to the worn-out lives of her patients in an area of Manchester where money wasn’t always available to prevent the illnesses that she treated. Now she worked two days a week in a practice near where she herself lived, and the work no longer appeared so exhausting: not only because the job was part-time, but also because she believed many of the diseases and ailments she saw in her patients were less preventable. People lived well and were dying inevitable and not pereventable deaths.
That was how she put it to him that day, and Tom might have seen in her statement a cruelty that wouldn’t have seemed too far removed in tone from some of her comments online. But while they focused on the influx of immigration, here she was saying no more than that, comfortably off people have to be philosophical about their health problems; it needn’t be a sociological issue. He supposed what had shifted was the emphasis when she was a full-time GP on wishing the NHS had more money; now she wanted fewer people in the country.
It was there in a remark she made over dinner when saying she was reading an article about immigration statistics in the last ten years, and how many more people were getting into the country. During the last decade, the main political event was, of course, leaving the European Union - a decision based not a little on limiting immigration. Since she voted to stay, it wouldn’t have been fair to point out a contradiction in her thinking, even if Tom wondered were the referendum to take place now, she would vote to leave, and on the most stringent terms, with no lawyers capable of overturning harsh decisions. As she spoke, Tom tried to gauge Maurice’s reaction, but he didn’t seem to agree or disagree with her. Was this a regular rant he chose to ignore, or a complicit agreement that needn’t usually be talked about? Tom was hoping that when he looked across at him, he would offer in his expression a look that said his wife was talking nonsense, and that this was just a phase she was going through. The kids asked to leave the table and went off to play, and the three of them sat there, and Tom wondered to himself whether he should ask Maurice what he thought. But it somehow felt like it wasn’t his place to inquire, even if he did think it was his place to disagree with his sister. Maybe, with Tom contradicting Simona, Maurice would have made his own position clearer. But as Tom said he didn’t think removing human rights from people, voting for every more right-wing governments, and allowing the wealthy to become ever richer, were answers to what he could agree was a crisis in most western countries, he also heard is own voice as obvious and clumsily liberal, as though he’d accumulated in his mind half a dozen right-thinking columnists, without finding a position of his own. As he spoke, Maurice again gave no sign he was any more in agreement with him than he was with his wife, and after a minute, said he should clear the table and start on the dishes. Tom said he would help, and Simona said she had a little work to do and would pop upstairs for half an hour. She added they could continue the discussion when she had finished her work and they had finished theirs. She said it with a smile ,and it was as if, in the grin, Tom saw more political hope than in anything he’d just said.
11
Maurice washed, and Tom dried as Maurice said someone was coming to fix the dishwasher on Monday - but hey, it gave him the excuse to leave the table and avoid an argument. He didn’t say more about it, but Tom took it to mean more than the potential disagreement Simona and Tom might have become involved in as they moved on to discussing other things. Maurice worked as a child psychologist, and he always seemed to Tom a man who was so concerned about others that what might be taken for his self-absorption (he was often lost in his own mind) was a distracted empathy, as if he were thinking of his patients long after they had left his practice. It was not there in any disclosures he ever made about his clients, of course, but in remarks Tom occasionally heard him make when Tom accompanied him to the park, and they would watch the kids clamber over climbing frames or spin themselves on a roundabout. Maurice occasionally commented on other children they could observe, seeing in them a timidity that left him musing over its source, or an assertiveness that came, he suspected, from a bullying, pushy parent, and the kid was doing the same to others.
As he washed the dishes, Tom asked him if he ever thought psychologically about adults as he would about children. He lightly laughed and said he did so often. He would watch anybody from sports people to politicians on TV and think about their gestures, and see in them childhoods they had never outgrown, and insecurities no amount of success would allow them to lose. Maurice reckoned everybody is a child who grows old, but rarely one who grows up. The maturity people do display, they may often credit to their age, but often it is more a product of their youth. They had the good fortune of having a childhood that was happy, or at least un-traumatic.
As he said this, Tom didn’t want to talk about his own, and didn’t quite feel he could ask Maurice about his, though he assumed it was conventional enough for Simona never to have proposed it was otherwise. But when he thought this, Simona might have believed her very brother’s childhood was without great trauma, and there he had been a few weeks before sobbing on a couch, recalling his primary school years, after nothing more than a mild fall. Maurice told Tom about a snooker player who interested him, saying there was one game he played where he asked the referee how much prize money was available if he cleared the table and managed to pot all the balls consecutively, and achieve a 147 break. This was near the very beginning, after he had only potted a couple of balls, and the commentators found it breathtakingly insouciant of the player to ask, partly because the game had already started and everybody in the crowd would recognise the naked greed in the asking. He was also very far from the 147 at this stage in the match. He would go on to clear the table, and just before finishing, look like he couldn’t be bothered to pot the final black. 147s are rare, and some great players never achieve them. To turn away from one is a scandal, and the referee managed to persuade him to pot the last ball and achieve that 147.
Maurice wasn’t a great snooker fan and was watching the game with others in a pub at the time, and couldn’t believe the player was only interested in the prize money, and looked to psychological reasons for the player’s provocativeness, believing he may have found it in the player’s youth. His parents were both imprisoned; his father for murder. Life must look pretty precarious after that, Maurice believed, and what better way of manifesting that precarity than years later showing that what seems very important can be shown not to matter at all?
As they finished the dishes, made some tea and waited for Simona to join them again, Maurice supposed that what he would often do, when looking at people’s adult behaviour within a childhood he could glean, might have seemed reductive. But he thought that while this may be so, it was still better than trying to claim that many people’s actions can be isolated in the present. If the snooker player had cleared the table without asking about the prize money, without looking as though he didn’t want to pot the black, then the action could be seen as a practical achievement, rather than a psychological aberration. If we accept the behaviour is somehow odd, then it seemed to him to make sense to find out why that may be so. Maurice added that, of course, often normal actions contain within them oddities too, but that would be for another discussion.
12
Over the weekend, Tom took the children to the cinema himself, then they were joined by Simona and Maurice for lunch in Manchester town centre, and then he took them to the park while Simona went to a yoga class and Maurice back to the house to do some paperwork. It was a fulfilling day, and he hoped the children enjoyed his company, well aware that sometimes kids are never happier than when an adult is treating them: the personality is less important than the figure’s purchasing power. He insisted, of course, on paying for the film tickets, and while Maurice insisted on paying for lunch, he took the kids afterwards for ice cream at a parlour near the play park. As he watched them playing with the other children, the oldest, Mark, was only a year younger than Tom would have been when he was bullied, and he found himself observing him as Maurice often seemed to, looking for signs of the adult the boy would become, seeing in the child behaviour that was in the process of defining him. Mark seemed fearless and confident as he spent most of his time on the zip line, feeling that the swings, the slides, the seesaw and the roundabout were for youngsters, and there he would be in a couple of years, ready for the big school. He was one of the oldest children in the playground, and he appeared to enjoy helping the younger kids grow more assured as they ventured onto the zip line, too, using his own confidence to augment that of others. It seemed to Tom the opposite of bullying, and led him to remember more vividly a situation that may have brought his own terrors to an end.
Once again, Ian and Donald were making his life horrible, but this time outside the confines of the school walls as he was walking home, and they caught up with him. They hauled him into a triangular park about halfway between the school and his home, and while Donald pinned him down, Ian gathered some grass to stuff into his mouth. Just as Ian was beginning to do so, a group of about eight secondary kids were passing by the crescent and witnessed what was going on, with one of them jumping over the two-foot crescent wall and pushing Ian away as he was about to administer the grass, and pulling Donald by the back of his jumper as he yanked him off. Some of the others in the secondary school group had climbed over the wall as well, and were saying the boys should see what would happen to them when they got to the big school. There would be far bigger boys there than they. By now, others had gathered outside the crescent; some older children coming from the secondary school and going home in the direction Tom had come from; others from the primary school who were going home the same way as Tom. There must have been thirty people witnessing the incident, and when Tom saw the concerned look on his saviour’s face, and saw also on what may have been the boy’s girlfriend’s face a look of great pity, he couldn’t stop tears forming that he only just managed to hold back.
When thinking about it afterwards, he came to see that it wouldn’t have been enough for someone to come to his rescue if tears had flowed. If anybody had helped who wasn’t strong enough to do so, or even if the boy had been, but Tom would have started crying, then he suspected he would have been back to being bullied once more. It took a boy much stronger than Ian and Donald, but also it needed Tom to show just enough strength to see in the eyes of others pity towards him that he wasn’t, visibly, emotionally weakened by. After Donald and Ian slunked off, and most of the onlookers continued on their way, the boy and his girlfriend introduced themselves and said they would walk him home. Tom said he would be fine, but the girl insisted, saying that they might come after him again. He didn’t think this likely — and if they wanted to get at him once more, couldn’t they do it the next day, or the day after?
Tom eventually accepted the walk home because he liked them, and liked the smell of the boy’s leather jacket and the soft, fruity smell of her perfume. When they asked him more about himself, he said that he had a sister in secondary school, and when he mentioned Simona’s name and described her, they knew who she was: she happened to be in the same year, but not in the same class. The girl said Simona was known to be an assured woman. They appeared so grown up to him, so capable of taking on the world, while Tom felt that he might go through it, always relying on adults to help him, even when he became an adult himself.
He probably wasn’t entirely wrong in this diagnosis, but he was no longer bullied in the final month of primary school, and wasn’t at all when he went on to secondary school. It was odd that he didn’t think of this moment in the crescent more often, and found it terrible that he still remembered the name of his tormentors, but couldn’t remember what the boy and his girlfriend were called, even though they provided them that day, and were people he continued to admire, like Neil, for years afterwards. When he saw them in secondary school, they always said hello, and the friends he found there, friends coming from other primary schools around the island, were impressed that he knew people older than him who would say hello as if they were equals, and knew, too, of course, that he had a beautiful sister.
13
He asked her the next evening about her time at school as a way of trying to talk to her about the incident with the courier, and her posts on social media denigrating immigrants. The kids were in bed, and Maurice was upstairs working, and she was about to turn the television on after dinner when Tom asked her a couple of questions. She seemed absorbed enough in them to put the remote control to one side. Tom assumed she was always happy at school, did well at the subjects which interested her, and obviously well enough to go on to become a doctor. She admitted she enjoyed school and liked the attention she received. Simona said it as though she was speaking about another person, and while in some ways she was — she said now she was a mum with two kids and the beginnings of a weight problem that was hardly debilitating, but wasn’t conducive to receiving the stares of your peers. Tom asked her if she missed those looks, playing on the pun of those looking at her and the appearance she used to have. She didn’t get the play on words, but did say if it weren’t for the kids, she might have felt their absence, but what are glances at you on the street next to the world she has built up now? It seemed to him both a way of claiming the additional weight of having kids and the responsibility that comes with them, and also as a subtle suggestion, rather than a dig or a criticism at Tom’s childlessness, that he should consider having children of his own. She proposed it might get Tom out of his own head, just as it helped her get away from staring at herself in the mirror.
She may have been right, but Tom never met anybody he wanted to build a life with, as if his own was too precarious in its foundations, and yet wasn’t it similar to his sister’s, except for those months many years earlier? However, he supposed it wasn’t that the period of torment was long, but the secrecy he generated out of it happened to be so, which might have seemed unusual, since around thirty people witnessed the final moment of that terror. He could never speak about it, and there he was that evening preparing to do so, as if he had found at last a context and a purpose in which to share it with his sister.
He started by asking her about the views she was sharing on the two social media platforms she used, and she looked surprised he knew about them, though he was a friend of hers on one of them, and the other was accessible to anyone with an account. Simona said that she had been getting fed up thinking things to herself, then shared her thoughts with a couple of other parents, found they agreed with her, and so used the platforms she had to make clear she was unhappy with the number of immigrants in the country. Tom might have accepted some of these posts if they reflected an unease he understood, but that was hardly how social media worked. It wasn’t a medium of exploration, but one of exhortation — and many of his sister’s posts weren’t easily distinguishable from parties of the hard right. He didn’t quite say this to her, partly because he wanted to address his own feelings as readily as attack her for her troublesome assumptions, but also because he believed that his life wasn’t at all undermined by immigration, and Simona insisted hers was. He needed to at least acknowledge this, and yet he wanted to propose that the frustrations she was expressing were nothing next to those she was criticising.
As she discussed the various ways the city was becoming transformed, resources limited and amenities overstretched, he asked how she would distinguish between the positive aspects of immigration and the negative ones. He said that when he read her posts, they were always about the failures and never about the pluses. If she had the right to express her views based on personal experience, that was fine. But did her personal experiences not include instances of positive immigrant encounters? Did she not sometimes go to Indian restaurants, get takeaways delivered by migrants, and in her own profession see doctors and nurses coming in from across the world to take the burden off health care? Would these be personal experiences, too? She supposed they were. But they weren’t her personal experiences; they were theirs. And why should they equal hers when they were in her country? As she said it, she heard herself, or saw an expression of surprise on Tom’s face. Simona said she didn’t quite mean it like that, and added that if she were working in another country, she would feel privileged that the place would have her, and would fit in as well as she could. He asked if she ever thought about people leaving loved ones back home, or countries losing their doctors and nurses, with now holes in their own health systems, while plugging those in ours? It seemed as though he was asking a political question, but it was instead a way of seeing if his sister could comprehend a personal one. That may have left Tom even more questionable in his enquiry, as she may have been in her beliefs, as though Tom was using the problems of immigrants to find a way of discussing his own. But the personal and the political were at least honestly connected in his mind — if it weren’t for the incident with the courier, he wouldn’t have been likely to have conjured up so many thoughts from that year at school.
14
He then said to her that it might be possible that a brother and sister could have exactly the same background, but not at all share the same experiences based on it. She may never have felt like an immigrant, but he did. Tom said that while she moved from London to the island without feeling like she had moved from a foreign land, his experience was quite different. He remembered her telling him years before that what she liked about moving from a huge city to a small town, from the south of England to the north of Scotland, was that it made her worldly at a young age. She didn’t add that she was also physically a woman by the time she arrived, developing faster than most girls her age, while he was barely into adolescence. But he didn’t doubt that was part of her confidence. When he now thought of the boy who had saved him in the crescent, and his girlfriend, though they seemed to him so mature, they talked about Simona as though she was more grown up still, evident in the comment that he may have misremembered word for word, but was evident in the sentiment the girl expressed.
As they began talking about their respective childhoods, especially his year at the primary school, but also Simona’s years in secondary school, they both recognised that they had never discussed this time with each other. Simona was still in contact with several friends from those years, and Tom with a couple of people he met after he left the primary. He sometimes talked to them about this time at secondary school, and didn’t doubt Simona did likewise with her friends. She admitted to him that she knew she would be fine from the very first day. As she looked in the mirror, she believed the school uniform suited her more than the one she wore in London (blue instead of burgundy). When she arrived at the school, several boys were standing near the entrance of the main gates, and as she passed them, she could see in their gaze not only admiration, but also intimidation. They looked like boys who would wolf whistle, but they didn’t quite have the confidence to do so to her, and this left her doubly assured: of her attractiveness and of the control she would have over it. As Simona went on to say that, as Tom probably knew, she had several boyfriends while in school (and finished with all of them when she was bored), a group of friends that she supposed was the cool group of her year, and that she was its centre, she offered it without the arrogance she may have believed she displayed at the time, but with concern, as she saw in Tom’s look an expression that showed she had been oblivious to others’ troubles, and clearly her very own brother’s. She said a few other things but hastily, as if determined to hear about Tom’s experiences.
And so Tom told her about his first few months at the primary school on the island, the daily torment, he said — and then said that wasn’t true. It wasn’t quite daily, and it wasn’t quite tormenting. He thought a moment and said it was undermining that hers had been determining. Each day she would go to school, and her sense of self was augmented; he would go each day, and it was debilitated. It didn’t last that long, he said — and he was never beaten so badly that he was bruised or that any bone had been broken. No doubt in some schools, the bullied receive far harsher treatment. But it was abusive, and it was cruel. He wondered if many who never really grow out of adolescence are those who have their vulnerabilities beaten into them, whether with bruises or without. He wondered too if there are plenty whose beating is severe, but whose revenge was no less so, leaving them to grow into themselves by meting out on others the treatment they received. Ideally, that would come by taking on and taking out the bullies, but how often would a victim probably protect themselves, growing out of their adolescence, however troublesomely, by hurting somebody weaker still than they were?
Simona said she didn’t quite understand what he was saying, and that if Tom suspected her politics were questionable, his now seemed far further to the right than anything she might be supporting. She admitted she had become annoyed about one issue — the overcrowded classes. Maybe she became so annoyed because she saw herself as a liberal-minded person, and part of that liberal-mindedness was sending her children to a comprehensive school, not a private one. And there they were, in a school with too many kids per classroom. Social media, she admitted, had a way of making one’s views appear more extreme than they happen to be, and perhaps the popularity of her posts led her to express views stronger than she should have. She hadn’t posted anything for weeks, she added, and instead went into the school, discussing it with harassed teachers who were as fretful about the situation as she was. Had she stayed on social media, she would probably have been another person who started writing nonsense about teachers themselves.
He said he was pleased to hear that she checked herself, could see that while she had a justifiable complaint, it hadn’t become a culture of complaining, of scapegoating. As for his view being both obscure and offering a might-is-right perspective, he told Simona about something he’d watched in a film a few years ago. It was about an experiment with rats. Initially, you put a rat in an electrified cage, and the rat receives a shock. But the cage has a second compartment that isn’t electrified, and the rat quickly learns to escape into that area. The rat is fine. The experiment is repeated, and the rat promptly moves to the safe space. The scientist does the experiment again, but this time with no escape route, and the rat comes out a wreck. It is then done for a third time, but on this occasion with two rats who have no escape route but fight like crazy. They both come out in good shape. Tom supposed this showed flight, inhibition and fight in that order, and he supposed that those who are bullied and cannot escape their tormentor are inhibited, perhaps for life. Those who can somehow escape, and promptly enough, are okay; and those who fight back are fine too. He didn’t fight back, and the results were long-lasting, but hardly, he supposed, crippling. Or so he thought. And what is the moral of the story? Most would understandably see fight or flight. He thought maybe we need to miss the point and say we must stop electrocuting cages. Isn’t life too often an electrified cage, with humans forced to escape or fight, and many who are unable to do so either suffering from various diseases that appear to have no explanation, partly because the answer would be too all-encompassing?
It was then late. The kids would have long since fallen asleep. Maurice, twenty minutes earlier, had come down, made himself a no doubt herbal tea and taken it up to bed, and Tom knew that Simona wasn’t one for staying up much past midnight. Yet he knew he wanted to tell her about the courier, and though she occasionally yawned, it was different from the typical one that announced boredom or resolution, one that proposed the subject ought to be changed or the conversation concluded. He asked her if she was tired; she said yes, but it was good to talk. He should continue.
15
And so he did. He said he wanted to speak about an incident a couple of months earlier. If he’d been asked before, Tom would probably have said that he thought little about his childhood, hardly at all about his months of being bullied, and that he was a functional human being, no matter if he’d found no life partner, and had no children. In 1960, the absence of kids and a wife might have made him dysfunctional, but in the 2020s, it made him far from atypical. But yes, in the months leading up to the incident, he wasn’t happy, and credited it to the precariousness of his job and the cost of living. He didn’t doubt these were contributing factors to his reaction after he skidded on the road and fell off his bike, and was helped to his feet by someone whose English was minimal and his job, couriering food from one place to another, was precarious. The man’s capacity for empathy seemed enormous, perhaps all the larger when Tom realised that minutes lost in a job like the one he was doing was to lose at least money and potentially his employment. Of course, he said to Simona, Rahul probably only stayed with him for three or four minutes, but the courier gave the impression he would have stayed as long as Tom needed him to do so. He had, for those few minutes, but potentially for rather more, put the importance of his existence as of less value than Tom’s.
Saying this to Simona, Tom knew he must have sounded foolish, as he imagined in her mind somebody having the decency to stop, making sure he was alright,t and then promptly moving on. He wasn’t looking at his sister as he spoke, and he kept talking — saying he arrived home and sat himself on the couch, started to weep and couldn’t stop. He couldn’t remember the last time he cried, but he believed it might have been when he was still at primary school. He was being silly, and his wounds were minor. He felt a little like a child who gets up from a minor fall and bawls his eyes out as if he were suffering from an irreparable disaster.
He didn’t know what expression he expected to see on his sister’s face when he looked up, but the tears she had in her eyes, the soft expression he’d only ever seen on her face on two or three occasions, and one of them not long after her first child was born, was now evident. She didn’t cry, but then he’d never known her to do so. But it was, he didn’t doubt, an expression of sympathy for the childhood bullying he talked about, and his odd awareness of it through so minor a recent incident. Yet he was sure it also contained within it a concern yet far broader than that, and perhaps what he had wished to convey to her in the telling. He saw in her look perhaps more hope than it contained, but he was sure that, for a while at least, she would be unlikely again to generalise from the particular, to see in her children’s mild inconveniences that the country was swarming with immigrants. Maybe it was, just not where he lived and maybe the country needed them here more than his sister had been willing to accept. But he knew when it wasn’t, thirty years earlier, he was inconvenienced rather than more than his sister and her children seemed to be, and was himself, however briefly, however absurdly, perceived as a figure from elsewhere. He thought again about strength and weakness — of needing a boy strong enough to help him, and Tom managing to be strong enough to avoid crying. He wondered if, in speaking to his sister, as he did that evening, Simona would accept the weakness in others that he perhaps had found in himself at a very young age. Maybe she never needed tears of the child herself, or never needed to show them to him. But then had he ever shown them to her? That evening, he held his own back. Tom felt once again like the boy he still was in the triangular garden, proving he was stronger than he happened to be.
© Tony McKibbin